Kant's Principles of Politics and Perpetual Peace

KANT'S PRINCIPLES OF POLITICS

INCLUDING HIS ESSAY ON PERPETUAL PEACE

A CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICAL SCIENCE

EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY W. HASTIE

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Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-3825-8

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CONTENTS

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION.

PRINCIPLES OF POLITICS.

I. THE NATURAL PRINCIPLE OF THE POLITICAL ORDER.

II. THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL RIGHT.

III. THE PRINCIPLE OF PROGRESS.

PERPETUAL PEACE.

FIRST SUPPLEMENT.

SECOND SUPPLEMENT.

APPENDIX.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION.

Immanuel Kant, viewed in his manifold relations and influences, is now very generally regarded as the greatest philosopher of the modern world. He was certainly the most profound and constructive thinker of the Eighteenth Century, and all the higher speculation of the Nineteenth Century has been more or less occasioned or modified by him. There were great thinkers before Kant who variously exhibited the independent insight and power of the modern self-consciousness—Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, Bacon and Locke, Berkeley and Hume—but none of them reached the universality of his conceptions, the subtlety of his analysis of the higher forms of thought, or the fertility of his principles of knowledge. There have been great thinkers since Kant who have striven to give expression to the continued movement and aspiration of the purified reason—Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, Krause, Herbart, and Lotze, Rosmini and Gioberti, Comte, Mill, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer—but they have at the most only unfolded his seminal ideas, simplified his multiplicity, or applied in a one-sided way at the best the empirical side of his method. It is to the sceptred sovereigns of thought in the ancient world that we must return for the few who may justly be regarded as his peers. 'Immanuel Kant,' says a distinguished Italian writer, 'holds in the German Philosophy the place which belongs to Socrates in the Greek Philosophy. Just as all the philosophical systems of Greece were only the development of one or other aspect of the thought of Socrates, so all the philosophical systems of Germany, from the idealism of Hegel to the contemporary experimental philosophy, seem to start from Kant, and when they believe they have surpassed him, they are constrained to turn back and seek their inspiration in him again.'{1} Like Socrates, Kant created an epoch in the speculative history of the world, and even more than the 'Preceptor Germaniæ' became the first teacher of Europe. And all this, extravagant as it still may seem, is no mere partial foreign estimate, but has now come to be generally acknowledged by our own literary critics and historians of thought. 'Measured by one test of power,' says De Quincey, who was himself the best judge for his time of that test,—'namely, by the number of books written directly for or against himself, to say nothing of those which indirectly he has modified—there is no philosophic writer whatsoever, if we except Aristotle, Descartes and Locke, who can pretend to approach Kant in the extent or in the depth of influence which he has exercised over the minds of men.'{2} 'There can be no doubt,' says Dr Hutchison Stirling, 'that at this moment the place of Kant as generally estimated is that of the greatest German philosopher, greatest modern philosopher, greatest philosopher of all, with only the usual exceptions of Plato and Aristotle. Nor can there be any doubt that the like estimate will continue for some considerable time yet.'{3}

This relative supremacy as a thinker Kant owes mainly to the exceptional development in his own thinking of the pure Reason. By long years of assiduous discipline and a devotion to truth which had all the loftiness of a religious consecration, Kant attained the completest self-mastery and clarified his mind until it became a pure mirror of the universal Reason which is involved in all our knowing. Descartes was not more thorough in his rejection of prejudice, or in his questioning of first principles; Spinoza did not reflect with more passionless purity or deeper intellectual love on the ultimate substance of things; nor did Locke or Berkeley or Hume scan with keener vision the working and changes of the individual consciousness. This perfection in the development of his philosophical genius and character was accompanied with a corresponding completeness of technical training and equipment for his task. He probably knew more than any other man of his time of the common material of knowledge, and he certainly controlled it by the highest intellectual mastery. Far from being a mere dreamer of transcendental visions, he kept more than any thinker before him ever did on the solid ground of positive reality and within the practical requirements and limitations of common life. This is seen all through his philosophical work and may be proved by reference to every part of it. His philosophical development was singularly natural, harmonious, and complete. It obviously passed through three periods—the scientific, the speculative, and the practical; and any right understanding of Kant, or indeed of any side of his work, must be founded upon reference to all the three. Like other great thinkers he has suffered much from partial and one-sided interpretation, and his fulness and many-sidedness can only be reduced to unity by taking into view his philosophical development as a whole.{4}

Kant undoubtedly owed much to the fact that he was a thorough scientist before he became a speculative metaphysician. His own development was typical of the revolution in the method of thought which has produced modern philosophy: that certain knowledge of the real world must be the basis of all true knowledge of the ideal world, or that Physics must precede Metaphysics. He happily began his work by appropriating all the mathematical and physical science of his age, and he made it the stable foundation and criterion of all his subsequent thinking. He was a faithful disciple of Newton to whose principles and method he owed most of his formative power. He even applied the Newtonian mathematics to new physical problems with important new results. By mathematical speculation he confidently predicted the condition of Saturn's rings as afterwards verified by Sir W. Herschel, in the same way as the discovery of Neptune was calculated out by Adams and Leverrier. He investigated anew the laws of motion; and he outlined the cosmogony of Laplace. The retardation of the rotation of the earth by the tides, the periodicity of the trade winds, the elasticity of the ether, the causes of earthquakes, the volcanoes in the moon, the origin of heat in the universe, and all the questions of Physical Geography and Anthropology, were eagerly studied and elucidated by him. With that divining insight which is only attained through patient service and ministration in the Temple of Nature, he saw deep into the struggle of the Cosmic Forces, and even formulated the Darwinian theory of the Origin of Species and the evolution of the Human Race. Had he never written anything but his 'Universal History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens,' he would have ranked as the first of the modern evolutionists and the founder of scientific cosmology. No great philosophical thinker was ever more entirely at home with the phenomena and laws of empirical science than Immanuel Kant.{5}

But, as all know, it was during the speculative period of his development that Kant achieved his most original and epoch-making work. He had hitherto rested all his knowledge and faith upon the traditional conceptions formulated in the Leibniz-Wolffian metaphysics, when, as he tells us his 'dogmatic slumber' was interrupted by the sceptical doubt of David Hume, as to the validity of the accepted idea of causality. Hume assumed with his immediate predecessors that the idea is not innate, and he seemed to shew that it was neither necessary, nor universal, nor objective, but only a contingent, particular and subjective product of our associated sensations. If so we have no right to carry the notion of causality outward beyond the inner play of our own individual minds. The idea that one thing causes another to be is merely an illusion begotten by custom, or 'a bastard of the imagination,' as Kant puts it; and we have therefore no real knowledge of objective causation in itself, or of any essential connection of things with each other, or of any being transcending mere appearances or phenomena. Kant at once generalised Hume's doubt; and so he saw that it undermined all the old metaphysical assumptions, and that unless a new metaphysic were found to meet it the whole structure of human knowledge would crumble to pieces. Like Reid, Kant felt deeply the disappointment and pain of this position, and he girded himself with all his power and knowledge to deal with it. Hume thus became negatively to him in the second period of his development what Newton had been to him positively in the first; and it was Newton's science that carried him victoriously through the doubt of Hume. Kant was compelled to investigate anew the whole problem of the origin and extent of human knowledge, a problem which had been incidentally suggested to Locke but which, as Hume had proved, had been imperfectly solved by him. Kant thus put again to himself the question: 'What can I know?' in its deepest and widest sense, and the result was the Critical Philosophy.{6} The question 'What can I know?' is identical with the question 'What can Reason know?' and this question at once resolved itself into a Criticism of the capability of pure Reason as a faculty of knowledge. Kant, like all great thinkers, was the truest child of his age, and his greatest philosophical work 'The Critique of Pure Reason' (1781) was the philosophical culmination of the critical spirit of the Eighteenth Century, in its effort to turn upon and determine by inner scrutiny the conditions of Reason itself as the highest factor of knowledge. In prosecuting his task Kant had a twofold purpose in view: to secure, on philosophical grounds, the certain knowledge already realised by the Understanding in Mathematics and Physics, and to ascertain whether pure Reason was capable of attaining similar real knowledge of its proper objects in the higher sphere of thought. Kant did not directly answer Hume, but he indirectly repelled the application of his doubt to the sphere of knowledge cultivated by the Mathematicians, and so remarkably extended by Newton; and in doing so he not only systematised philosophical Criticism as a new department of science, but laid the basis of a new Metaphysic. He had already laid it down that 'the genuine method of Metaphysics is one and the same in principle with that which Newton introduced into physical science,'{7} and he never lost sight of this criterion and point of view. In the possession so far of certain knowledge, he thinks as a Mathematician and Physicist, all through his criticism of the pure Reason, from beginning to end, and from his primary certainty to his final result. In the first part of this Critique he established the validity of pure Mathematics by basing them upon the à priori forms of space and time as necessarily and universally inherent in the faculty of Sense, and as thus furnishing the conditions for the indefinite extension of mathematical science. In the second part he logically vindicates the validity of Physical Science on the ground of the universal and necessary categories or thought-forms, such as causality, inherent à priori in the Understanding, and combined with the material of sense through the plastic function of the imagination. Above and beyond the faculties of Sense and Understanding is the higher faculty of Reason proper; and the crucial problem of the Critique was to determine whether the pure Reason, i.e. Reason viewed as the highest intellectual faculty and taken by itself, could attain objective knowledge in its own sphere akin or analogous to the scientific knowledge realised through the function of the lower faculties in mathematics and physics. Such knowledge would evidently constitute real scientific metaphysics. It is impossible to enter here on Kant's most ingenious and elaborate discussion of this the highest question of intellectual philosophy. The result of his discussion is familiar to all who know anything of modern speculation and need not be dwelt on; but it still needs to be pointed out that Kant even here strictly adheres to the presuppositions and results of his mathematico-physical Science. Reason has three à priori Ideas or supreme forms, but it cannot apply them to the objects of which it is in search, namely, the Soul, the World, and God, because they are not directly presented as objects to it; and it only feeds itself upon illusions when it takes its formal transcendental Ideas for these real objects. All its attempts to make any speculative or transcendental use or application of those ideas only involve it in insoluble contradictions and paralogisms, as it has really nothing before it but the activity of the Understanding, evolving forms in which mere subjective processes are treated as objective realities. In dealing with these fictitious and self-destructive speculations, Kant displays all the methodical rigour and practical realism of the trained scientist. Nothing can be evolved out of the pure Reason which could be fitted into a scientific system of knowledge of real things, or which could positively supplement the actual discoveries of the mathematician and the physicist. All real positive knowledge of existing things is thus limited to the objects of experience by the demonstrated sterility of reason in its own special activity, and reason struggles in vain to escape from the inner vacancy in which she is imprisoned, or to manufacture a world of reality out of